When it comes to hair — long beautiful hair or gleaming streaming hair or flaxen waxen hair — I am afraid that sweet nostalgia trip about flower children and free love has already become an also-ran on Broadway.

You want hair? Big hair? Hair you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley?

The champ is unquestionably “Rock of Ages,” a seriously silly, absurdly enjoyable arena-rock musical that thrashed open at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Tuesday night in front of a bobbing sea of cigarette lighters waved aloft. The frothing piles of pleated, teased, bleached, dyed and fried tresses being tossed around in this new show about the good old days — in this case the 1980s on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles — make “Hair” look tame indeed, virtually Rogaine-ready, the Yul Brynner of musicals.

Fortunately, and I must say surprisingly, the attractions of this latest in the ceaseless parade of jukebox musicals on Broadway extend well beyond the extensions. Written with winky wit by Chris D’Arienzo, directed with zest by Kristin Hanggi, sung with scorching heat by a spirited cast, and featuring a towering stack of heavy-rotation favorites from the glory years of MTV — hits from Journey and Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar and Poison, Whitesnake and Twisted Sister — this karaoke comedy about warped-vinyl dreams is about as guilty as pleasures get. Call it “Xanadu” for straight people — and straight-friendly people too.

The volcanic locks and endless guitar solos are tethered to a thin plot concocted from showbiz clichés spruced up in skin-hugging leather and acid-washed denim. But so what if the story is stale as the air in a dive bar at 6 a.m.? Mr. D’Arienzo, Ms. Hanggi and their ace designers (costumes by Gregory Gale, hair and wigs by Tom Watson and sets by Beowulf Boritt) mockingly evoke the sights, sounds and smells of the era with an affection so pure and an aesthetic so archly on-target that the familiar is freshened by a festive parade of gumdrop-colored lingerie and pungent grunge. When somebody pulls out a four-pack of Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, the audience roars as if at a punch line of supreme perceptiveness.

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Constantine Maroulis, left, and Amy Spanger in a scene from the 80s-rock musical, Rock of Ages.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Drew (Constantine Maroulis) is a shy kid from Michigan who sweeps the floors at the Bourbon Room, a legendary club on the Strip, while he waits for his dream of guitar-god stardom to materialize. Rocking his world one day is Sherrie (Amy Spanger), an aspiring actress from small-town Kansas also hoping to make it big in Hollywood. When her classic Farrah Fawcett meets his mid-period Steven Tyler, it’s love at first stroke of the brush.

Dating at least back to “Babes in Arms” is the subsidiary plot about a greedy German real estate developer (Paul Schoeffler) and his effete son (Wesley Taylor) who want to raze the Bourbon Room — and the rest of the Strip — to rebuild it along more profitable lines. Under threat of eviction, the club’s proprietor, Dennis (Adam Dannheisser), an old pothead and rock dog, hatches a plan to rescue the club by hosting the farewell concert from the mega-band Arsenal, which got its start there. On the momentous night Drew gets his big break as the opening act but also has his heart nearly broken when Stacee Jaxx (James Carpinello), the bleach-brained singer of Arsenal, puts the moves on the sequin-struck Sherrie.

Dressing up these story lines like studs on a belt are more than two dozen radio-rock hits from the era. Audiences to whom this music is utterly foreign will no doubt view “Rock of Ages” as they might an unusually raucous couple of hours in the monkey cage at the zoo. You don’t have to truly like the music to succumb to the tug of remembrance it inspires, but you have to recognize it. If Proust had never tasted that first madeleine, the last wouldn’t have had quite the same impact.

I was an adolescent pop snob in the ’80s, turning up my nose at the vulgarity of straight-up guitar-driven rock to seek out adventurers on the fringe, which is to say anything British involving big, bad hair of a different sort. But while waiting impatiently for MTV to vouchsafe a morsel of Siouxsie or the Smiths, I absorbed an awful lot of thrashy pop.

“Rock of Ages” made me realize with humility how time can play appalling tricks on taste; songs that used to make my skin crawl and my lip curl, having now acquired the patina of age, brought forth a stream of affectionate recollection. “Don’t Stop Believing” and “Waiting for a Girl Like You” and “We Built This City” are not the musical equivalents of classic Bordeaux vintages, but I never would have guessed that wine coolers could age this well.

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James Carpinello plays the rocker Stacee Jaxx and Amy Spanger an aspiring actress.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The performances blend sincere conviction and knowing parody. Mr. Maroulis, an alum of “American Idol,” possesses a soulful, pure and intense voice that negotiates the mountains of melisma and cuts through the electricity with ease. He isn’t required to do anything intense in the acting department, but has a natural, laid-back presence that invites you to root for Drew. Ms. Spanger, a veteran of several Broadway shows, sings with a matching ferocity, and plays the hard-used heroine with a smidgen of real winsomeness.

The supporting players are just as terrific. Mr. Carpinello, got up in a sequined zebra-stripe tank top and white leather suggestive of Cher at her least demure, plays the drug-dazed egomaniac Stacee with commanding sexual charisma, blasting his big solo, Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” (a song I furtively loved even back in the day), to the back wall of the theater. Mr. Taylor, in rosy-cheeked Pee Wee makeup and goofball German accent, shares a preposterously funny duet with Lauren Molina, as an earth-girl activist, on Ms. Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” Just as amusing is the unexpected duet performed by Mr. Dannheisser and Mitchell Jarvis, who plays Dennis’s right-hand man at the club, on REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” — a dreadful song, yes, but repurposed to sweetly subversive effect here.

Mr. Jarvis’s hilarious, pop-eyed performance as the evening’s narrator is among the show’s zaniest and most original delights. Sporting a spiked mullet and a series of tacky T-shirts, he zips around the stage merrily, adding comic commentary or plugging a hole in the plot. It’s as if a perky, wise-cracking woodland animal from a Disney cartoon had leaped off the screen, become human and acquired a taste for both illicit drugs and ballet.

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“Rock of Ages” does not possess the deadpan brilliance of the classic mock-doc “This Is Spinal Tap” (what does?), and two-plus hours may seem a long time to spend inside a David Lee Roth video. But in These Straitened Economic Times the allure of nostalgia cannot be underestimated. “Rock of Ages” does not aspire to be a Broadway musical for the ages, but for anyone whose youth coincided with the time period in question, the siren call of those screaming guitars and singalong choruses may be impossible to resist.

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